Friday, November 16, 2007

500 Posts and Counting

According to my Blogger dashboard, this is my 500th post on Mr. Dilettante. There are a couple of posts that I started that remained in permanent draft limbo, but I've managed to get this far in slightly less than two years.

We all blog for different reasons. Jeff Kouba of Truth Vs. the Machine provides a nice treatment of why some people blog; go ahead and hit the link: I'll wait.

For me, blogging is like dropping a penny in a well. Sometimes you hear a splash, other times you don't. It's been my experience that certain posts that I dashed off without much thought have garnered a lot of attention, while pieces that I thought were well-reasoned don't get any response at all. There is an element of performance to blogging, too -- can you say what you want to say in a compelling enough manner that you can find and maintain an audience? And facing the blank page (or, in this case, the blank computer screen) is a challenge that many people don't relish; I want the challenge, for reasons that still aren't entirely clear to me even after nearly 44 years of living.

You should do some things because they matter to you. We all spend a lot of time doing things we have to do, or things that we aren't sure we want to do. There's a tendency in our time to treat everything as an obligation, even the things we ostensibly do for leisure. I've come to the computer 500 times now; when you write that many posts, the process can take on a whiff of obligation. It's not an obligation; it's a joy.